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“Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don’t bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!” – Bob Marley
We’ve all seen that fairground ride, the one that shakes you about while you try to stay on your feet? That is what trying to succeed feels like: a constant battle with an unpredictable enemy.
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
In reality the road to success doesn’t only shake. It changes direction, it’s full of potholes, and there are restrictions and rules, warning signs. Then there are the people getting in the way – either unintentionally, or by just being outright cynical about your dreams and goals. Add to the mix your normal daily routine that makes you feel like you are riding a unicycle while juggling, and it’s easy to feel like you’ll never make any progress.
If all this isn’t enough you then have advice coming in from everywhere, ‘Be positive’, ‘Pick yourself up’, ‘what’s your problem?’, ‘Your life isn’t that bad!’, ‘You cannot blame your past’, ‘Grow up’, ‘You’re an adult now’ – All things said by people doing no better than ourselves. We hear these snippets of wisdom from family and friends that do care and mean well. They believe they’re helping, but unfortunately they have the opposite effect, making you concentrate on how bad you think things are, forcing you to justify to them and to yourself why you cannot ‘just be happy’. Then, like you are not feeling bad enough, they analyse your life in great detail and compare you to other people, as if their input will help you suddenly realise that your life is great and there is nothing to be unhappy about.
I know, because I used to be one of these ‘wise friends’ that knew everything.
“STRESS” has recently become a popular word in our language. We speak of this as the age of stress. Worry, anxiety, insomnia, stomach ulcers have become accepted as a necessary part of the world in which we live. – From Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz in 1960
That was written over 50 years ago: before the microchip, modern computers, mobile telephones and the Internet were all designed to make our lives easier. We can store to-do lists, appointments and anything we need to remember online, and have our personal devices remind us. We no longer need to remember anything or even think about these things after they have been stored. We should more chilled out than ever before. Despite this, you only have to ask a friend, colleague or neighbour to realise how stressed people have become. Research by Perkins, (1994) cited in the Harvard Business Review, showed that 60% to 90% of doctor visits were stress-related. I believe this must have increased in the 20 years since then, and is still increasing to this day. Sleeping tablets, antidepressants and all kinds of medicines are prescribed more often than ever before. I don’t believe in the conspiracies that think we are in the pocket of the big drug companies, instead I believe our very busy doctors do not have the time or the resources to diagnose and to properly treat the causes of stress. It is easier to suppress them than to deal with the problem.
Then we have that old chestnut ‘hard work’.
Until recently I believed the only thing you needed for success was hard work – good old-fashioned elbow grease. I was constantly writing lists, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had to do that day, my mind was so full of ‘stuff’ I couldn’t do anything efficiently. I’d walk in a room and forget why I went in there. All I was really achieving were bigger lists, more stress, less sleep and more debt. How could this be, when I was working harder and longer hours than ever before, I was following the rules?
You really don’t need to live that way. You are choosing to live like that, just as I was. It was what I concentrated on and put all my energy into, even though it was affecting me negatively. The more I thought about my list of things to do, the longer it grew; the more I thought about my lack of time, the less I had; the more I thought about missing my partner the more it got to me. It became a self-defeating vicious cycle.
I soon realised what was holding me back, who was holding me back and why it had taken me so long to make the change.
‘The Moving Road‘ is the essence of my journey.
My dream was to sign off support, have my own business and eventually build my own adapted house. I had dreamed about building my own house since my school days, but never knew how to apply my life in the right way to achieve that.
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